Best Of Indie Games: Shell-Shocked by Dirty Troopers

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.] This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week. The goodies in this edition include a procedural-generated exploration game set inside a network of caves, a Xbox Live Indie Game pick, an isometric exploration shooter, and a casual puzzler created by veteran board game designer Reiner Knizia. Here's the highlights from the last seven days: Game Pick: 'SHOC Trooper' (Ruben Garza, freeware) "SHOC Trooper is an isometric exploration shooter that feels rather amateurish, yet enjoyable enough. You are the SHOC Trooper, and you are set on various missions to kill aliens and clones and other sci-fi thingies." Game Pick: 'Dirt' (Broken Kings, commercial indie) "Dirt is a procedurally-generated exploration game in which you play as a skeletal cat trapped inside a network of caves with only a pickaxe in hand to dig at the walls and floors. Players can move in any of the four directions available to them, and if they want to dig upwards all they have to do is turn their iDevice upside down to change the gravity inside the room." Game Pick: 'Gow' (TeamIso, browser) "Gow looks a little like World of Goo, but it plays nothing like it - your task is to kill all of the Gow balls by popping them or leading them into spikes and saws. The game is really good fun and well thought-out, with clever puzzles to solve." Game Pick: 'Rotor' (Pocket Starship, commercial indie) "Rotor is described as Crazy Taxi with a helicopter and a Mirror’s Edge aesthetic. With a set amount of time on the clock, you're left to zip around the skies above a cityscape, finding missions and grabbing points." Game Pick: 'Teocalli' (Bigfoot Studios, commercial indie) "Teocalli is a casual puzzle game designed by Reiner Knizia (creator of many well-known board games) to be played in short sessions of ten to fifteen minutes. You're an architect tasked with constructing temples in a limited number of turns, and you do this by rolling a set of special dice and placing them on each row until an entire temple is built."